Speakers

Gregg Alton joined Gilead Sciences in 1999. From 2001 to 2009 he served as General Counsel. In his current role, Mr. Alton is responsible for legal affairs, government affairs, medical affairs, public affairs and international access activities. Prior to joining Gilead, Mr. Alton was an attorney at the law firm of Cooley Godward, LLP, where he specialized in mergers and acquisitions, corporate partnerships and corporate finance transactions for healthcare and information technology companies.  Mr. Alton is a member of the board and treasurer of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a member of the board of Oculus Innovative Sciences, Inc. and a member of the board of BayBio, a San Francisco Bay Area life sciences industry organization. Mr. Alton received a bachelor’s degree in legal studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and holds a JD from Stanford University.

Jana Armstrong has been responsible for DNDi’s North American activities since October 2007, including the establishment of the new North American affiliate. Ms. Armstrong joined DNDi in March 2004 as Fundraising Manager after spending 4 years with the humanitarian medical relief agency Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières in Kenya, Sudan and Switzerland. Prior to that, she spent 8 years in international business development in the health care services and products sector in Russia, Central Europe, Switzerland, the UK and the US. Ms. Armstrong has an MBA in International Management from Thunderbird/American Graduate School of International Management and a BS in Business Administration from Indiana University.

Professor Baker is co-chair and policy analyst for Health GAP (Global Access Project) and is actively engaged in campaigns for Universal Access to treatment, prevention, and care for people living with HIV/AIDS, especially expanded and improved medical treatment.  He has written and consulted extensively on intellectual property rights, trade, health financing and access to medicines, including with the African Union, ASEAN, Venezuela, CARICOM, Thailand, DfID, the World Health Organization, the Millennium Development Goals Project and others. He works on policy issues concerning the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the US PEPFAR Program, and how those priority disease initiatives might contribute more broadly to improving health care delivery in developing countries. Professor Baker works on issues involving human resources for health and health system strengthening and is a  member of the executive board of the Health Workforce Advocacy Initiative of the Global Health Workforce Alliance. Finally he is active in a workingg group challenging IMF macroeconomic policies that restrict increased government and donor spending on health and education in developing countries.

Mr. Carlson is a Principal in the Silicon Valley office of Fish & Richardson P.C. He previously served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Roderick R. McKelvie of the District Court of Delaware (1999-2000) and to the Honorable Paul R. Michel of the Federal Circuit (2000-2001).  Mr. Carlson served as a Volunteer in the United States Peace Corps in Morocco (1993-1996), where he directed health and sanitation projects in rural villages of the High Atlas Mountains, speaking Berber and Arabic.

Phillip Chase is the Legal Vice President of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals with over 10 years of legal experience, with a focus in the biotechnology industry. Prior to joining Alnylam, Mr. Chase served as Vice President and General Counsel at RenaMed Biologics. Before that, Mr. Chase served as Vice President and General Counsel of EPIX Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and played an integral role in the merger of EPIX and Predix Pharmaceuticals Holdings, Inc. Mr. Chase also served as Chief Corporate Counsel at Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc. Prior to moving into the biotechnology industry, Mr. Chase worked at the law firms of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, and Shearman & Sterling LLP. He received his J.D. degree from Columbia University School of Law and his B.A. from Colby College.

Richard Chin is an Internist with extensive expertise in drug development. He has overseen over 40 Investigational New Drug (IND) Applications for new molecular entities and new indications, as well as eight New Drug Applications (NDAs)/Biologic License Applications (BLAs), and has authored a major textbook on clinical trial medicine. Dr. Chin joins One World Health from OXiGENE, where he served as President and Chief Executive Officer. Previously, Dr. Chin served as Senior Vice President and Head of Global Development for Elan Corporation, where he had worldwide responsibility for Clinical Development, Regulatory, Biostatistics, CMC, QA/Compliance, Safety and Medical Affairs. Dr. Chin has also held various clinical and scientific roles for Genentech, Inc. including Head of Clinical Research for the Biotherapeutics Unit, overseeing approximately half of the drugs at Genentech, and began his career at Procter and Gamble Pharmaceuticals, where he served as Associate Medical Director.

Suzanne Drennon Munck

Ellen ‘t Hoen is the Senior Adviser for Intellectual Property and Medicines Patent Pool at UNITAID. She is a lawyer and an expert in medicines policy and intellectual property law. From 1999 until 2009 she was the Director of Policy and Advocacy at Médecins sans Frontières’ (MSF) Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines. In 2008 she was a research fellow at the IS HIV/AIDS Academy of the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of the book “The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power. Drug patents, access, innovation and the application of the WTO Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health.” which was published in January 2009.

Amy Kapczynski has clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court (for Justices O’Connor and Breyer, 2005-06) and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (for Judge Guido Calabresi, 2003-04).  In 2001, Kapczynski helped lead efforts that resulted in Yale University and Bristol-Myers Squibb permitting generic competition and providing steep price discounts for an important anti-AIDS drug (d4T) in South Africa. Drawing on this experience, Kapczynski co-founded Universities Allied for Essential Medicines with other students in 2002.  Kapczynski has worked with, among others, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, the East Bay Community Law Project, the Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit (Mumbai), the Bard College Human Rights Project, and Reproductive Health Matters (London).  Kapczynski has published articles on antidiscrimination law, constitutional history, and intellectual property issues. Her current research interests occupy the intersections between international law, intellectual property, and global health.

Sherry M. Knowles, Esq. is Senior Vice President and Chief Intellectual PropertyCounsel of GlaxoSmithKline, where she serves as the worldwide head of patentsand trademarks for both litigation and transactional matters. Ms. Knowles joined GSK in September 2006. Prior to that, she was a partner in and founder of the Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property Practice at King & Spalding LLP, where she represented companies, foundations and universities inconnection with patent prosecution, litigation, contracts, licensing, financing andother corporate intellectual property issues relating to pharmaceutical, biotechnology and chemical inventions.  Knowles is a frequent speaker on key issues relating to intellectual propertymatters that affect the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

Cale Lennon is currently the Assistant Director in the Office. Prior to joining Emory, he was in the Office of Technology Transfer and Business Development at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. During his tenure at Tulane, he held positions as senior licensing associate, associate director, and interim executive director. While at Tulane, Cale organized and obtained funding for the Technology Innovation Gap Fund a seed fund to support prototyping and proof-of-principal for early stage technologies. He earned his doctorate in genetics and molecular biology in 1999 from Emory University where he investigated in vivo transcription elongation. Cale holds a bachelor in science in aerospace engineering from the University of Virginia. He was previously a mechanical design engineer at United Technologies Pratt & Whitney where he designed jet engine hardware for the F/A 22 Raptor fighter.

James Love is the Director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI). Mr. Love is also the U.S. co-chair of the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) Intellectual Property Policy Committee, chair of Essential Inventions, an advisor to the X-Prize Foundation on a prize for TB diagnostics, and a member of the UNITAID Expert Group on Patent Pools, the MSF Working Group on Intellectual Property, the Stop-TB Partnership working group on new drug development, and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards. He advises UN agencies, national governments, international and regional intergovernmental organizations and public health NGOs, and is the author of a number of articles and monographs on innovation and intellectual property rights. In 2006, Knowledge Ecology International received a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

Emi MacLean, Doctors Without Borders, New York

Kathleen McCowin is currently a Licensing Officer at University of California, Berkeley. She does marketing, license negotiation and drafting for UCB inventions in alternative energy, IT, medical devices, sensors, nanotech, material science, and other technologies.  In previous positions Kathleen was Intellectual Property Counsel, Proteus Biomedical, a medical device start-up and Senior Intellectual Property Counsel, Becton Dickinson supporting their Clontech, PharMingen and BDIS businesses. Earlier, Kathleen was Senior Counsel at Heller Eherman and Patent Counsel, NASA.   From 1988-98, Kathleen served as a patent attorney, University of California Lawrence Berkeley & Livermore National Laboratories, and is pleased to return to public service at her Alma Matter. Kathleen started her IP carrier as Patent Examiner, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Carol Mimura is the assistant vice chancellor for Intellectual Property & Industry Research Alliances (IPIRA) at UC Berkeley and former head of the campus’s Office of Technology Licensing. Under her direction, Berkeley’s socially responsible licensing initiative has made it possible for campus researchers — including, notably, synthetic-biology pioneer Jay Keasling — to get the benefits of their work into the developing world through innovative arrangements with commercial partners. Mimura is a member of the Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, a former member of the board of directors of Children’s Hospital Research Institute in Oakland, CA and of BayBio, the regional voice of biotechnology in N. California.  She holds a B.S. degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Biology from Boston University.

Vern Norviel is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he leads the patents and innovation counseling practice. Vern has more than two decades of experience in formulating successful strategies for life science companies and the development of their IP programs. He represents a wide variety of companies, as well as venture capital firms, in areas such as therapeutics, diagnostics, nanotechnology, genomics, proteomics, and personalized medicine.  During his career, Vern has authored or prosecuted more than 15 patents that have been litigated in the United States and abroad, and has overseen intellectual property lawsuits throughout the world.  Vern currently serves as a member of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati’s Policy and Nominating Committees.

Roger Ross is responsible for oversight of all legal matters affecting Via and its various licensing programs as well as managing Via’s legal and compliance teams. Prior to joining Via, Roger was a partner in the Silicon Valley office of McDermott, Will and Emery. He has spent more than 15 years representing technology and media companies such as Matsushita/Panasonic, Netscape, Cisco, Applied Materials, Intel, MovieLabs, RealNetworks, Yahoo, and Universal Studios. Roger served as the founding General Counsel of Liberate Technologies. Prior to studying law, he worked in the data processing industry for a decade.  Roger is a frequent speaker on the topics of intellectual property licensing and standards-based patent pools. He earned his J.D. from the University of Kentucky College of Law and his bachelor’s degree in information systems from the University of Colorado.

Robert Sachs is resident in the San Francisco office and his practice concentrates on strategic patent counseling and prosecution for software technologies.  He is also the primary patent evaluator for various patent pools on today’s most important audio, video, and communications technologies, including IEEE 802.11, MPEG-4 AAC, DVB-MHP, OCAP, Digital Radio Mondiale, and NFC-IP.

Suzanne Scotchmer is professor of law, professor of economics, and professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.  Her main academic interest at the moment is the economics, policy and law of innovation, including intellectual property. She also maintains an interest in economic theory and game theory, in which she has also published widely. Her graduate degrees are in economics and statistics.  She has served on committees of the National Research Council (National Academies of Sciences), is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and serves, or has served, on several boards, including the Toulouse School of Economics and the American Law and Economics Association. She is currently a member of the 2010 program committee of the American Economic Association. The Department of Justice Antitrust Division has used her as a consultant on antitrust matters; and she has been a scholar in residence at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Anthony So serves as Professor of the Practice of Public Policy Studies at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, where he started the Program on Global Health and Technology Access in 2004. Dr. So’s research on the ownership of knowledge and how it is best harnessed to improve the public’s health spans from conceptualizing a technology trust and patent pools to reengineering the value chain from R&D to the delivery of health technologies for developing countries.

David Winickoff‘s work involves combining the fields of law, humanities, bioethics, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Using frameworks from these disciplines, he interprets and analyzes the politics of health and environment, the governance of new technologies and the mutual formation of knowledge and social structure. He is interested in developing policies that help guide science and innovation to address the most pressing environmental and health problems. This is, in part, done by studying systems of property and intellectual property, environmental regulation, food safety, human subjects research, and public health.